1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to electronic apparatuses, and more particularly to an automatic charging station for an autonomous mobile machine.
2. Description of the Related Art
A conventional autonomous mobile machine, like a robot, is battery-driven. However, the battery is exhaustible to require manual operation of recharging the robot to keep the robot in power. An autonomous mobile vacuum cleaner developed by Irobot Corporation is operated to autonomously move along a predetermined route indoors for sucking dust therearound on the ground, thereby cleaning the environment automatically without manual operation. However, the vacuum cleaner still has to be recharged by manual operation.
Sony Corporation developed a charging system for a mobile robot. The charging system includes visible recognition data arranged in a predetermined location of an automatic charging station, an image pickup unit mounted on the mobile robot, a calculating unit for calculating a range and a bearing from the mobile robot to the automatic charging station, based on an image picked up by the image pickup unit, and a searching unit for causing the mobile robot to search for the automatic charging station, based on the calculation result provided by the calculating unit. However, the aforementioned image pickup, object searching, visible recognition, and calculation are high technology to cause high production cost and complex structural designing for the user.